Some years ago, a former state college president, by then safe in retirement, told me how easy it was to bamboozle members of the college’s governing board.
While members of the gubernatorially appointed board of visitors may have accomplished backgrounds as strong business leaders in their respective fields, they rarely applied those skills to their work on the college board, he said. They hardly ever asked detailed — and certainly not critical — questions of whatever proposals the administration put before them. Instead, they were mostly just happy to be there and treated board meetings as mild interruptions to a weekend of socializing, attending a football game and getting squired around as Big Men on Campus.
Those days may now be long gone. If they’re not, the recent events at the University of Virginia show why they need to be. Over the weekend, the Jefferson Council, a group of conservative alumni who had been critical of now-resigned President James Ryan, released a timeline of events — which alleged that the University of Virginia had failed to meet Department of Justice deadlines to provide evidence that the school was dismantling its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In an interview on CNN, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the school had requested multiple deadline extensions and may have simply rebranded DEI programs under “a series of euphemisms” to hide their existence from federal investigators.
“I did express to leaders at UVa that we significantly lacked confidence at the Department of Justice, that Jim Ryan, given his public statements and his ongoing public statements, and his participation in groups talking about suing the Trump administration to avoid having to do exactly what we were requiring them to do,” Dhillon told CNN. “I don’t have any confidence that he was going to be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of DEI.”
If that’s so — and I feel quite certainly we don’t yet know the full story — then Ryan was defying not just the Trump administration, but also his own board of visitors, which had voted to end DEI programs. That raises anew the question I posed over the weekend: Where was the board in all this? Whether the board was in agreement with the Department of Justice or whether it was opposed seems irrelevant procedurally. If the former, then why wasn’t it the board that was demanding Ryan comply or quit? If the latter, well, I’d be surprised since it’s a board where a majority of the members are now appointees of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Either way, the board seems strangely silent about its most important employee.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, we had another development: Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County, warned the board not to pick a new president “anytime soon” because if Democrats win the fall elections, they could install a new majority on the board. To do that, they’d first have to reject Youngkin’s latest round of appointments, but Senate Democrats seemed quite in the mood to do just that. “There will be a different ideological majority come next July 1,” Surovell said.
Whatever your views on this matter, one thing is clear: College boards are now a political matter in a way they haven’t been before. I remember back in the 1990s, then-Gov. Jim Gilmore personally interviewed prospective board appointees to make sure their views were in line with his agenda. That struck some then as an inappropriate politicization of college boards, although presumably any governor would want his or her appointees to any board, college or otherwise, to be in alignment with the governor’s views. That’s sort of the point of elections; we pick a governor to shape government one way or another. However, there was a feeling in some quarters that colleges should be above the fray in a way that, say, the State Water Control Board should not be. Those days now seem long gone.
Let’s step back and take a long view at what’s going on here.
1. All this is unprecedented.
We’ve never had a situation where the federal government forced out the president of a state university. Nor have we ever had a situation where the majority party in the legislature was threatening to block board of visitors appointments from the governor of an opposing party so as to create more vacancies for a governor of that majority party to fill.
2. Richmond is becoming more like Washington.
We do, though, have a precedent at the national level: Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on whether to confirm President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court, pending the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. When that election elevated Donald Trump to the White House, Trump was then able to make his own nomination to the court. Here we have a state Senate majority leader essentially using the same leverage that McConnell had.
3. Virginia’s appointment process is rooted in a bygone era.
Surovell said that when the General Assembly convenes in January, it will take a look at university governance and, specifically, the sequence of nominations and confirmations. At the national level, a presidential appointee doesn’t take office until the Senate confirms him or her. In Virginia, that gubernatorial appointee to a board of visitors takes office immediately; the confirmation vote might not come for as much as nearly a year later, depending on when the appointment is made and when the legislature convenes. That’s how Youngkin can appoint former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia board, have a Senate committee later reject his nomination and then both parties argue over whether Cuccinelli is on or off. That particular argument depends on whether the committee vote is enough to block the appointment (meaning the nomination is dead and not going forward) or whether a full vote of the legislature is required (meaning that’s necessary to remove Cuccinelli). A court will resolve that, but Surovell said legislation may be required to change the order of things.
Why is Virginia’s nomination and confirmation sequence the way it is? Because it dates from a much earlier era of Virginia politics when things were less partisan and state government, both the administration and the legislature, were dominated by the same political point of view. The confirmation process then was more of a formality, the option to block a gubernatorial nominee rarely used. We now have a situation that the framers of our constitution didn’t envision when it was being drafted in the late 1960s: that we’d have a much more partisan political environment where, in this case, Democrats are threatening to block Republican appointees so that they can more quickly institute an ideological makeover of a key board.
If Virginia Republicans think there might be a situation where there’s a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature, they might find merit in Surovell’s proposal — otherwise that future Democratic governor could install some controversial appointees on a college board and the legislature wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until several board meetings had already taken place.
4. Surovell’s warning to the University of Virginia could also apply to Virginia Military Institute.
There’s another state college in Virginia that is looking for a new leader under controversial circumstances: VMI, where the board earlier this year declined to renew the contract of Superintendent Cedric Wins. While Surovell didn’t specifically mention VMI, his warning to the UVa board not to hire a president “anytime soon” because there could be “a new ideological majority” on the board next July 1 would seem to apply in Lexington as well as it does in Charlottesville. Democrats are already unhappy that the VMI board didn’t give a new contract to Wins, the school’s first Black superintendent, so already had VMI in their sights. The warning not to proceed quickly could have practical consequences: Who would accept a position to lead either institution if they think the board that hired them is about to be dramatically remade by a new governor?
5. Ryan was in no position to fight the Trump administration.
Some think he should have. Harvard has certainly taken on the Trump administration, but there’s a key difference: Harvard is a private institution; the University of Virginia is a state school — and its governing board will, after July 1, be composed entirely of Republican appointees. The school’s legal advice comes from the state attorney general’s office, now held by Republican Jason Miyares. It is not realistic to expect a school governed by a Republican board to get into a legal fight with a Republican administration in Washington. It would be fascinating to watch a different scenario play out — a Republican board vs. a Democratic president or a Democratic board vs. a Republican president — but that’s not what we have here. While we are not privy yet to all the facts, the basic political lay of the land is not in favor of a college president of a state school in Virginia who wants to fight the federal government.
6. It’s hard to root out DEI from a university.
Let’s set aside the question of whether such programs should be eliminated; our 2021 governor’s election and 2024 presidential election essentially settled that for the time being. Let’s just look at the practicality of doing so. Universities are fundamentally liberal institutions. I don’t buy the argument that schools are “indoctrinating” students — otherwise, professors would indoctrinate students to turn in their work on time and not fall asleep in class. However, educational attainment is one of the key dividers in our politics today — Democrats do best with those who have a college degree, Republicans do best with those who don’t. Just look at how college towns vote: Kamala Harris took 82.94% of the vote in Charlottesville.
There is no doubt a lot of philosophical support within the University of Virginia for DEI, no matter what the president of the United States or governor of Virginia has decreed. Even if a new president of the university were to order such programs dismantled, how easy would that be? A large university doesn’t always make for a pretty org chart the further down you go. Such schools are only superficially set up like corporations; there are lots of power centers you don’t find within a normal company — alumni, a faculty senate, all sorts of centers and institutes with different funding streams and different constituencies.
Even if a university were set up like a corporation, it would be hard to change. When former Pepsi president John Sculley became CEO of Apple in the 1980s, he became frustrated by the company culture. He was accustomed to giving orders and expecting them to be carried out; at Apple, he once famously said, his orders were treated as merely suggestions. Imagine how he’d feel at a university, where no doubt a lot of employees might actively oppose a no-DEI dictate handed down from above. What we have here is a culture clash, and we don’t know yet how all this is going to play out over time.
7. We don’t really know much about the details.
“DEI” is one of those hot-button phrases that gets people fired up one way or another, and people think they know what it means. In this case, though, we don’t really know what UVa was doing or not doing. In some ways, that’s the problem: Federal investigators seem not to know either. It also sounds as if some at UVa might say of a particular program, “Oh, this isn’t DEI, this is something else.” That’s why it would be good to get a full report so we can all know exactly what’s what. That way, if we’re going to debate things, we can debate specifics and not slogans.
8. Virginia Democrats will need to address just how combative they would be against Trump.
In the recent Democratic primary to pick candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general, the prevailing theme was that every candidate promised to resist Trump. That kind of anti-Trump enthusiasm works well in a Democratic primary, but in a general election, we move to a more practical series of questions: Just what, exactly, does this kind of “resistance” look like? All three Democratic candidates for statewide office last week issued statements decrying the Trump administration’s role in pushing out Ryan. What, though, would they advise? For instance: Should a future UVa board dominated by Democratic appointees be willing to sue the Trump administration? What’s the pain point there in terms of how many resources — taxpayer dollars — should go to that resistance? The Borg’s slogan from Star Trek is wrong: Resistance is not necessarily futile, but it can be expensive.
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